A college devoted to reading and talking about books?

A college devoted to reading and talking about books?

As part of his conversation about the problems of higher education, Stanley Fish discovered plans to just scrap everything and start over:

Stephen Blackwood, a young man fresh from receiving his doctoral degree , … told me — can you believe it? — that he is starting from scratch a new liberal arts college, Ralston College, to be located in Savannah, GA. Either blissfully unaware of the obstacles rehearsed in the woe-is-us books or wrapped in the armor of faith and innocence like a modern St. George, Blackwood, without very much experience or money, has so far managed to secure a promise of buildings to house his new enterprise, gained the moral and honorific support of Harold Bloom, Hilary Putnam and Salman Rushdie, and applied for a tax status that will allow him to recruit and admit students, all of whom will receive full tuition scholarships paid for by the funds he plans to raise in the near future.

When they get to Savannah, the students of Ralston College will find that the school year is the entire year, 12 months, that they are expected to dine together and wear academic gowns, that they will all be reading the same texts organized around a yearly theme (in successive years, the Self, God, Nature, Community and the Beautiful), that the texts will be “supremely difficult” and begin with Greek and Roman authors, many of whom will be revisited the next year under the aegis of a new theme, and that they will also be receiving instruction in the visual arts, mathematics, the sciences and foreign languages (at least two).

“We believe,” declares the college’s Web brochure, “that the goal of general education is to produce a person who can draw on different fields of knowledge and at the same time grasp the whole of which each field is a part.” This means that “Ralston is fundamentally about reading books, thinking about them, and talking about them.” No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure. Back to the future! Plato and students under the plane tree in Savannah.

Sounds great. Jibes with my opinions about the type of education students are getting in college. Where do I send my CV?

I read further to see if Fish found fault with the proposed structure of Ralston College. He didn’t. In fact, according to the college’s Twitter feed, Fish just joined the Board of Visitors.

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Matt J. Duffy, PhD, is an academic media scholar. His works have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Middle East Media, the Journal of Mass Media Ethics and the Newspaper Research Journal. An assistant professor of communication, Duffy teaches UAE and international media law at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. He is an active member of AUSACE, the Arab-US Association for Communication Educators. Follow him on Twitter.

6 Comments

Shannon
November 10, 2010 at 5:19 pm

Interesting.
I do have to agree with one commentator: those academic gowns are going to get mighty hot down in Savannah.

Not a bad idea. That, and the quadrivium, should be minimum one has to master before studying *anything else* (at least at the university level – we’ll always need trade schools like the one I attended on North Avenue).

rocinante
November 10, 2010 at 6:27 pm

PS – I think you wear the hat so they won’t mistake you for a ‘private security contractor’. Heh.

This would have been my dream as a student. I don’t think I could handle it as a teacher…I could just see me having to get them to read Plato when I can’t get them to even read Vogue.

Hiba
November 11, 2010 at 7:59 pm

very interesting!
I wish if this collage exists in my country,
I think it would be helpful if they add a personality type tests, so they know the characteristics, interests and strength of their students, especially personalities with a spiritual think!

About the Author

Dr. Matt J. Duffy serves as an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, USA. He enjoys teaching the art of good journalism, a noble profession and powerful tool for social change. Duffy worked as a journalist for several news outlets including the Boston Herald and the Marietta Daily Journal. He now teaches journalism and media law.
Duffy's research focuses on international approaches to media law. Wolters Kluwer will publish the second edition of his"Media Laws in the United Arab Emirates" in 2017. He has published more than a dozen academic articles and writes occasionally for niche publications. Duffy enjoyed a visit to Pakistan in May 2016 as part of the Fulbright Scholar program from the US State Department. Since 2012, Duffy has served on the board of the Arab-United States Association for Communication Educators, an organization that aims to improve journalism in the Middle East. He also owns Oxford Editing that he started in 2007.